


you know this story; you know what happens next.

by coldhope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gore, Multi, Oneshot, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 18:52:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Psiioniic watches the Signless's execution, and reflects. Not nice, not fun. Short and mildly gory. <i>What was it all even for?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	you know this story; you know what happens next.

You all knew it would end like this. All of you, and you hid it, or forgot it, or thought around it in your different ways, but you all knew, all had known, this was how it had to finish. That makes it, unfairly, even harder to bear.

It’s not even his reflected agony that’s the worst thing about this—or the sure and certain knowledge of what awaits  _you_ , now that you’re official Empire property—it’s not even Dolorosa’s tears, although those close a sick fist under the end of your breastbone. It’s not Disciple’s hands bloodless-pearly-grey on the patched and much-mended ledger of her gospels. It’s the sheer mindless atavistic hatred in the faces of everybody watching.

When you were younger, you’d seen a troll taken by the drones. He’d been running from them, and he’d made it a pretty good distance, but the thing about the drones is that the drones are implacable and do not tire and don’t have to seek shelter during daylight, and they had found him and they had dragged him back through the village he’d lived in. He had called out to the crowd that gathered to watch: didn’t they know him, he was just Kyreis who ran the little shop on the corner, he’d never done anything to them, couldn’t they see this wasn’t  _right_?

You had watched, feeling ill, as the expressions flowed over the crowd’s collective face: first shock, then a flicker of denial, anger, and then following those a profound awareness that whatever was happening, it wasn’t happening to  _them_. After that the yelling had begun, and the throwing things. Kyreis-who-ran-the-shop had been bleeding from a dozen places by the time the drones had hauled him out of sight. 

That same roaring hungry hatred borne of fear and the desire to keep official attention on whoever was being punished, that’s what you see in these faces. More than anything else, it makes you want to cry for the waste of all your efforts, everything he’s done, everything he’s worked for and sacrificed, everything he’s put himself through for the sake of these same fucking people with their smug fuck-you-got-mine expressions. Why had he ever bothered? These people  _deserve_  slavery.

But you can’t even sink into that to blot your awareness away with hate, because you know it isn’t true; you know that what he’s tried so hard to teach them is real, and that without the subjugglators and laughsassins and legislacerators and threshecutioners and the drones, always the drones, without the Condesce’s eye always on them, these people would be no worse than any of his party. You couldn’t write off mobs as all as stupid as their loudest member, because if you did that then you were no better than the Empress. 

He screams. You can smell his flesh cooking in the shackles, still glowing with a sullen dull-red heat. The ultramarine of the arrow in his side clashes with his improbable, forbidden blood; it moves as he breathes in great bubbling gasps. The point is in his lung. You cannot imagine the pain, and yet he speaks, he goes on speaking, wringing the last drop of conscious agency from his dying body. He says the things you’d secretly always wanted to hear him say, and now you cannot bear to hear them, because it’s too late. He denounces them. He says, go to hell your own way. I showed you another, and you have rejected it. I offered you the promise of a better life, and you refused. 

Dolorosa has run out of tears; without your arm round her shoulders she would have fallen. She watches him, eyes glassy and barely seeing through the haze of smoke and grief, her mouth frozen in an ugly downturned gape. You remember her cuffing him upside the head for being an idiot, gracefully turning whatever Disciple brought back from her hunts into dinner you would have gladly paid for at a restaurant, holding all of you, one by one, when the day-horrors were too strong. She looks like a hag, now, grotesque, her face shiny and wet and unbeautiful. 

When he gathers his remaining breath for his last, greatest curse, you watch the E%ecutor’s arrow move jerkily in his side, his scarlet blood hazing the blue into something royal, and you feel your own breath catch and hold in the moment before he speaks. 

Then it’s over, something greater than all of you put together has slipped free and flown. You let consciousness fade from the outside in, the buzz of the crowd becoming a distant roar. You don’t need to pay attention any further. You know this story. You know what happens next.

When they take his mother away from you, you don’t even turn to watch her go. 


End file.
